Savants throughout history (along with a fair number of quacks and hucksters) have interpreted comets streaking across the sky as heralds of doom or harbingers of great change. Perhaps had we here at OSU’s Rare Books Library been wearing our divinators’ hats earlier this month we would have associated the arrival on our doorstep [...]

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was one of sixteenth-century England’s most influential religious and political figures. Best known, perhaps, for writing and compiling the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the summation and embodiment of the Reformed English liturgy, Cranmer also wrote a [...]

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has acquired this past summer a complete run of The Paris Review from its very first issue in 1953 through the Spring issue of 2008.   The Paris Review is arguably the most pretigious and influential literary journal of the latter half of the twentieth century.  Its contributors form the pantheon [...]

Another new acquisition has just arrived: Serious Reflections on the Dangerous Tendency of the Common Practice of Card-playing; Especially of the Game of All-Fours, as It Hath Been Publickly play’d at Oxford, in this present Year of our Lord, MDCCLIV. In a Letter from Mr. Gyles Smith, to his Friend Abraham Nixon, Esq; of the [...]

It’s with great excitement that my first contribution to the OSU Rare Books and Manuscripts blog gives me the opportunity to do something other than introduce myself (see a separate post for that). After all, anyone reading this is surely more interested in learning about new treasures recently acquired rather than hearing about my recent [...]